EDU-40206: Online and Blended Learning Design

Week 6: Micro-lecture – Universal Design for Learning

Welcome to week six, micro lecture, universal design for learning. You've been reading so
far about inclusion and accessibility and you should have read about the universal design for
learning framework which supports online learning. This micro lecture is going to talk about
more about what UDL is and ways that we can approach supporting students, especially in
online and blended environment. I want you to consider what is UDL and how does it
support inclusion and accessibility, how can you embed it within your practice, what
takeaways could you use and how does it apply to online and blended learning.

When we think about learning, we recognize that learning isn't a one size fits all and that
some students have certain barriers that prevent them from learning and quite often there
is approaches to resolving these individual barriers through the form of things such as
reasonable adjustments for that individual. But what if there is a way to prevent that barrier
from happening in the first place and that's where the universal design for learning
framework comes in.

So there is universal design for learning which is all about removing the barriers for all
students by essentially preparing for all barriers and to overcome all barriers to level the
playing field and it's broken down into three main areas. Multiple means of engagement,
which is the why of the learning, the multiple means of representation, which is the what of
the learning and multiple means of action and expression, which is the how of the learning.
I'm going to talk about each of these in a lot more detail now.

So under the heading of engagement it falls into three broad categories, recruiting interest
which is all about excitement and curiosity for learning, sustaining effort and persistence
which is being able to tackle a challenge and self-regulation which is harnessing the power
of emotion and motivation. So the first thing that you that you need to think about is
optimizing individual choice and autonomy. So provide learners with as much autonomy as
possible to be able to provide choice so that could be in the level of challenge the type of
reward or recognition available, the context or content used for practicing the skill, the tools
used for gathering information or producing something, the colour, the design, the graphics,
the layouts, the sequencing for completion and the subcomponents of the task, allow
learners to participate in the design of the activities and involve learners wherever possible
in setting their own goals. You can also optimise the relevance, the value and authenticity.
So you can vary the activities and the sources so they can be personalised and
contextualised to individual learners' lives, make sure things are culturally relevant and
socially relevant and age appropriate for your students. Design activities so that the learning
outcomes are authentic and communicate to real audiences reflecting the purpose that is
clear to participants, provide tasks that allow for active participation exploration and
experimentation, invite personal response and self-reflection and include activities that
foster the use of the imagination to solve problems. Then we want to minimise threats and
distractions, so create an accepting and supportive environment varying the levels of risks,

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so create routines, allow options that can maximise the spontaneity if they want to, vary the
level of stimulation and the social demands required on the students and make sure you're
involving all participants in whole class discussions. You can then heighten the prominence
of goals and objectives, so you can prompt learners to facilitate goal development and
display the goals in multiple ways and keep referring back to them and encourage lots of
short-term goals as well as long-term goals and use prompts to scaffold the outcomes that
you're aiming for and engage learners in discussions about these. You can then vary the
demands and resources to optimise the challenge, so that would involve differentiating the
degree of difficulty within core activities and providing alternatives if available and vary in
the degree of freedom within that and emphasise the effort and improvement in meeting
the standards. Then we've got fostering collaboration and community and this is important
for all online and blended learning to gather that sense of belonging but create learning
groups that have got clear roles and responsibilities and provide prompts that guide
learners in how they can talk to their peers and support their peers, encourage those peer-
to-peer interactions as well as teacher interactions and construct communities of learners.
Increase in mastery orientated feedback, so provide feedback that encourages that
perseverance and resilience and encourages specific strategies that students can use in the
face of challenge, provide feedback that emphasises effort and improvement achieving a
standard rather than on relative performance, provide timely feedback that's frequent and
specific and that's informative rather than comparative. From our expectations and belief
that are so optimised motivation to provide prompt reminders, guides, rubrics, checklists,
provide kind of mentors, actors that kind of coach to students and support activities that
encourage the self-reflection and identify personal goals of students. Facilitate personal
coping skills and strategies, so help students to manage their frustrations when they arise
and be able to succeed by handling fears and coping mechanisms and use real-life situations
to demonstrate those coping skills and finally develop self-assessment and reflection, so
offer aids such as reflection tools to allow students to collect their thoughts and use this as a
means to kind of get feedback and assess how they've progressed.

So we have three key themes for representation, so perception which is all about
interacting with flexible content that doesn't depend on a single sense, then you've got
language and symbols so communicate through languages that create a shared
understanding and comprehension construct meaning of this new understanding that
you've created. So this breaks down into several other areas, so offering ways of
customising the display of information, so that could be as simple as uploading an editable
version so the size of the text, the contrast between the background, the font use can all be
adapted by students for their needs, think about the use of colour for example to emphasise
information, then you've got offer alternatives for auditory information, so for example use
things such as transcripts or captions, provide visual diagrams that can be used instead.
Thirdly offer alternatives for visual information, so provide descriptions for example alt text
on all images, if you’re in-person provide physical objects instead that students can touch.
Then moving on to language, so clarify vocabulary and symbols, so pre-teach the vocabulary
you want the students to use especially in ways that connect the learner to the prior
knowledge that they already have, highlight the complex terms and how they're made up of
simpler words and symbols. Clarify the syntax and structure is the next one, so highlight the
structural relations to make them more specific, make connections to previously learned

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structures and make relationships explicit. Support the decoding of text and information, so
allow the use of text to speech and automatic voicing for things such as mathematical
notation and normal digital text to speech that allows for the flexibility for students. Then
we've got promoting understanding across languages, so make all information available in a
dominant language that would allow students to convert it into their own language, link to
key vocabulary and come up with a shared language for your subject with subject-specific
vocabulary, and then illustrate through multiple media, present key concepts in more than
one form, so don't just put it up as a maths equation, put it up as an alternative format as
well as a diagram, a video, an animation for example, and make the links between the two
explicit. Then we've got the comprehension, so activate or supply the background
knowledge, so link the prior knowledge to what you're learning, use things like knowledge
organizers, bridge the concepts with analogies and metaphors and make those cross-
curricular connections with other subjects. Highlight patterns, critical features and big ideas
and relationships, so really emphasise those in the key elements such as the text and the
graphics, and like I said, use these knowledge organisers to represent the information, use
multiple examples and cues. Guide information processing and visualisation, so give explicit
prompts for each step in a sequence help them with their organisation, provide interactive
ways of engaging with models that you're introducing, use scaffolds and chunk information
into smaller pieces, remove all of the distractions. Finally, maximise the transfer and
generalisations so provide checklist, organisers, notes, use new monarchs, incorporate
specific opportunities for review and practice and provide templates and scaffolds for new
ideas and how they link with familiar ideas. And that is how you can support students to feel
represented in their knowledge.

The themes for action and expression are physical actions, so the way students interact with
materials and tools and expression and communication, how they can share ideas to help
them reach their goals and executive functions, how they develop and act on plans to make
the most of their learning. So, you can do this by varying the methods for response and
navigation, so provide alternatives in the requirement for the timing of interaction or the
range of actions required, provide alternatives for physically responding, for example, using
things like polling software instead of written answers so they can share an easy alternative.
Then we've got optimising access to tools and assistive technologies, so provide keyboard
commands, for example, and access to alternative keyboard or overlays for screens,
software that works seamlessly with these kinds of tools. Use multiple media for
communication, so compose in multiple different media such as images, text, videos, for
example, use different web tools, for example, discussion forums, announcements, use
various strategies, build fluencies with graduated levels of support for practice and
performance, so provide differentiated models that they can use to demonstrate the same
outcome, differentiate who they can go to, for example, mentors, tutors, provide
differentiated feedback so feedback that is accessible to them as a learner, and multiple
examples of solutions to problems. Guide appropriate goal setting, so provide prompts and
scaffolds to be able to support them to vary the difficulty of the goals they're setting,
provide models and guides and checklists. Support the planning and strategy development,
so embed prompts and provide checklists for how they stop and think or show and explain
just little prompts to what they should be doing at that point. Facilitate managing
information and resources, so for example, providing those knowledge organisers and

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embedding those prompts and checklists. Enhance capacity for monitoring progress, so ask
questions that guide reflection, that show the progress that's being made, that prompt
learners to identify what advice or feedback they're receiving and use templates to support
them to do this.